Or why you are wearing a picture of Santa Clause on you shirts, but-” “It’s Herman Melville.

That night it felt that somehow by flicking them off the roof, the matches would burn down everything, the sparks from the tips of the flames, torching the world and all the heartbroken people in it.

One has to adopt a sort of Zen calm, in which you know you wrote the best book that you could at the time.

To Beatrice- My love flew like a butterfly Until death swooped down like a bat As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said: 'That's the end of that.

I found powerful the idea that everything we have is, in effect, stolen from everybody else.

Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.

The way sadness works is one of the strangest riddles of the world.